E-Cigarettes Causing Poisonings

E-cigarettes are an alternative to smokers who are trying to quit their habits, although you would think smoking an e-cigarette rather than a regular cigarette would leave you care free, you would think wrong. It seems as if researchers have found a poison inducing agent within the nicotine cartridges of e-cigarettes, which are helping people curb their cravings all around the world.
There have been a large number of calls made to the poison control centers regarding the nicotine used in e-cigarettes. In the month of February there were about 215 poison center calls that were involved in some way, shape or form with e-cigarettes, this was stated by the CDC in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. What is even more alarming is the fact that 51% of the calls that were made had involved children that were 5 or younger. Seeing as not every single poisoning gets reported, we can only guess that there are more cases that went undiagnosed around the world.

Nicotine is a drug in its own right, so when it’s concentrated into a liquid form like the e-cigarettes use it becomes somewhat toxic, and this is out of the mouths of poison experts. They know what they’re talking about, so clearly something wrong is happening here. There seems like there isn’t a childproof feature on any of the e-cigarettes currently being produced, but they aren’t required to. They come in all sorts of exotic, fruit flavours, which means kids could easily pick them up.

“What’s attractive to kids: It’s the smell. It’s the scent. It’s the colour.” stated Gaylord Lopez, whom is director of the Georgia Poison Center. “A kids not going to know the difference between a poison and something they can drink.”